This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
The one card multiple numbers service refers to correspondence of one terminal to multiple numbers. That is, multiple numbers public to the outside are bound with one terminal in such a way that dialing any of the numbers by another user can make the terminal ring, and the current call between the caller and the callee will be connected, or a short message transmitted to any of the numbers can be received by the terminal, so that communication with the terminal or transmission of a short message to the terminal can be realized. When the user of the terminal acts as a caller, one of the numbers can be selected for initiation of a call or transmission of a short message as required by the user, and also one of the numbers can be selected for display on a terminal of the callee as required by the user.
When a one card multiple numbers service user is called, a proximity to a caller may be achieved because a call can be initiated to any registered number of the one card multiple numbers service user, and even if the caller and the callee are not in the same city, the calling user can communicate with a number that the callee registers in a city where the calling user is, so that the calling user can have a feel of proximity that the callee is in the same city as the city where the calling user is. A user can set local contact phone numbers for respective cities as needed and then bind the local contact phone numbers for the cities on the same terminal. A dialing client from any of the cities may feel as if the user were in the same city as the city where he is and thus have a feel of proximity.
Currently, the proposed one card multiple numbers service is implemented based upon an approach of burning multiple numbers on one SIM card and such an approach may be limited in the amount of numbers due to a limited capacity of the SIM card. Furthermore, only one number can be in use at a time and more than one number cannot be used concurrently. An additional resort to a wireless communication operator or a business hall for replacement or update of the SIM card may be required, and this may be adverse to extensive deployment of the service. Or, the approach may be put into practice only with significant adaptation of devices in the whole network.
An one card multiple numbers service user to answer a call or in reception of a short message may some times wish to be aware of which of the numbers registered by the callee a calling user dialed so as to substantially determine which category of users the caller belongs to (different numbers registered by the one card multiple numbers service user may be provided with respect to different categories of user, such as a business category, a friend category.) and thereby to decide whether to answer the call and what will be talked about. For example, a one card multiple numbers service user may be provided with two numbers, one of which is used for business, the other of which is used for friends, and both of which are associated with a current terminal. Upon reception of a telephone call at a user's office or in an office meeting, the user may be unable to determine whether it is a call from a client or a friend (e.g., in the case of an unfamiliar telephone number). As can be readily appreciated, answering of a call from a friend may be not appropriate in such a scenario, but a good chance might be missed if the call was not answered but relates to an important business. If the user can be aware of whether his registered business category or friend category to which the call from the caller belongs, then he can judge whether the call is incoming from a friend or a client and then decide whether to answer the current call.
In the other aspect, when dialing back directly for a call or a short message with reference to an answering record of a terminal, a one card multiple numbers service user may wish during dialing back to display to a callee a number that is the number the callee ever dialed. For example, when dialing back for a call from a friend in an answering record of a terminal, a one card multiple numbers service user may wish to still display to the friend one of the numbers which is registered in the friend category (i.e., the number that the friend ever dialed) instead of any of his other registered numbers. In this way, a different category of numbers can be provided only to a specify category of users, and also the use of a number ever dialed by a callee can facilitate identification of the number by the callee so that the callee can be aware of the identified number is not a strange number.
However, neither the function of displaying a number that a callee ever dialed nor the function of displaying, while dialing back, with automatic association a number that a callee ever dialed has been provided yet.